Christmas wreath on the dorrs of the Memorial Church. Phot by Jeffrey Blackwell/Memorial Church Communications
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By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Dec. 24, 2022)
In the name of God, our one Holy and undivided Trinity, our amen. Please be seated. Merry Christmas, again, welcome to the Memorial Church. We're so pleased and privileged that you are celebrating Christmas with us here this evening.
So it's Christmas. It feels like it came fast this year or came upon me more quickly than I might have guessed and we've been, like a lot of folks I think, scrambling the last few weeks and pulling things together. Let's be fair, my wife Collette mostly has been pulling things together the last few weeks and days before tomorrow, the big day. And to have young children as some of you who come to the church regularly know I tend to speak about them in my sermons. My daughter Cami is our acolyting tonight. Danny and Sammy are sitting with my family out there.
Danny, our youngest, who turns nine in a few days. He's got some questions about the Santa business and this year he has told us he has determined to see Santa he's in stay up or get up, stay alert and try to catch Santa in the act. He's been unique in this. Our other kids weren't really interested in seeing Santa. Sam on the contrary, who's my middle child about five years ago, I remember he was very concerned about this. What is this? A man we don't know is going to enter our house in the middle of the night? He's like, I don't want any part of that. He could stay downstairs. I will stay upstairs and we can keep the arrangement the way it is.
Sam back then was, actually, I don't know if you remember this Sammy, but back then he was more interested. The question of logistics didn't matter to him. He didn't worry about the how of Santa. He was worried about the why. Why would this person do this to all these strange children he doesn't know? And I asked him and he asked me, I asked him, "Well, what do you think?" And he said, "Probably because Jesus died." Which I think is a good answer. I mean I think it creates more questions than it answers, which makes it good theology. And I'm a theologian.
I do talk a lot about my kids in these sermons and I do it because I love them and they mean so much to me and I talk about them especially at Christmas time because two of my kids were born in December, right around Christmas. And when I hear the story of this birth, this transcendent transformative birth, I can't help but be reminded of those transformative transcendent events in the life of our family. And Christmas is a transformative transcendent event. Every year I get to walk behind the procession coming in while the whole congregation sings, Oh, Come All Ya Faithful. And this year I got to see my daughter Cammie leading the way carrying the cross. And I tell you, that feeling of all of you in full song watching the procession come in and Cammie at the front, that makes... That's worth the ordination on its own. That experience.
Tonight, Christmas is about this transcendent event, this transformative event and it is one, or at least we claim it is one, and yet the world is still the world. The world out there is still the world out there. And part of what we deal with, I think those of us who come to this church and come to celebrate a transcendent transformative event, is we have to figure out how it makes a difference in the rest of our lives or what difference it makes in the rest of our lives when our average days are neither transformative nor transcendent. On the contrary, some of them are hard and difficult and trying at best, some are worse than that.
There's this moment in the reading tonight which Connie read so well where the angels are shouting from the Heavens, singing hosannas and the shepherds of course are overwhelmed and then there are five optional verses. We included them tonight, but you don't have to. You can end with the angels if you want. We could have just ended with the angels shouting in the sky, but I wanted to include the last five verses because that's when they go away, and then the shepherds have to do something about it. What are they going to do with that?
Because to me, that's the story for us. Even if you felt it when the procession was going in and the choir was in full song and you heard the, Oh Come All Ye Faithful not only shout it out from your voice but in your heart, even if you felt that we're going to leave this church and go home and pretty soon it's going to be December 26th and every day to follow even difficult days. In a couple of days, the church is going to observe the feast of the holy innocence. When we remember that Herod massacred occurred every child under two, every male child under two in Bethlehem. What does that have... This tonight, this transcendent thing have to do with that. We have this child who's born to us, who is glad tidings of good news, but we also know that we, I hope you will be back here in Easter and holy week remembering that he died. What do we do with this?
This passage from Luke is our gospel lesson every Christmas and I preach on it every Christmas and although this is my only my second year here at the Memorial Church, I've preached on this several times and I tend to focus on the shepherds. If you were here last year, you might remember, I won't blame you if you don't. I talk mostly about the shepherds. The shepherds tend to capture my attention this year, not the shepherds. This year it was Mary. I thought about Mary, I thought about that line where it says, "She pondered these things in her heart." I was thinking about what she was thinking.
Thinking about Mary because as I said, two of our children were born right around Christmas. And so I'm always thinking about birthdays and births. Also thinking about Mary because some of you who are regular parts of this congregation know my mom died just before Thanksgiving and so I've been thinking about mothers also. And we're okay. My family is okay. We miss her.
My mom was an immigrant from Japan, born in Japan just after the end of World War II. And she didn't really talk to me or to us much about her childhood. And I realized even in the last weeks before she died, how little I know about how hard her life was the week before she died, she was telling me a story about when she was a little girl and she was with her mom and her mom gave her a single egg because protein was so hard to come by in occupation Japan and that one egg was all they had and it was a special treat for my mom and she just let my mom eat the whole egg and watched her eat it. I realized that week and in the week since she died, that my mom's life was difficult in ways that's probably hard for me to imagine. Not just that childhood but immigrating to the US.
Mary has just received all this news. First this news from Gabriel, the child that you will bear will be the anointed one. And now this strange news from these strange men who have come out of the fields and are telling her that her child is the one. And she takes all these things and ponders them into her heart. What was she thinking about? I don't know what she was thinking about. How could we know what she was thinking? Maybe we know what she was thinking. The writer, Kathleen Norris has a poem that she wrote about her sister after her sister gave birth. And the last three lines of that poem go like this. "Now the new mother, that leaky vessel begins to nurse her child, beginning the long goodbye, the long goodbye that begins with birth." Think about Mary and Mary's relationship to this child, this child we celebrate tonight, her relationship to him after this birth.
Later in this chapter, she will take him to the temple to be circumcised and to present him. And Simeon will come to her and say, "A sword will pierce your heart." As she offers him to God, they will tell her, "A sword will pierce your heart." And then later on they lose him in the temple because he's off teaching and they don't know what he is doing and they find him and he says, "Didn't you expect that I would be serving God?" And then later on in Luke 8, they want his attention. Mary and Jesus' brothers want his attention and Jesus's too busy ministering to others to give them any attention.
And then of course as we hear in the Book of John at the cross, it's Mary Jesus's mother who's at the foot of the cross having to watch him die. And in the Book of Acts gathering with the disciples and mourning him. Mary pondered all these things in her heart, the gospel says. Maybe we do know what she pondered. I know what I pondered the first time I held these kids in my arms, my kids in my arms. I felt great joy and great gratitude and great awareness of how fragile they are and how deeply I wanted to protect them and how limited my protection was. The long goodbye. That's what I pondered. Just like I know what I pondered the last time I held my kids, I know what I pondered the last time I held my mom. Wanting to protect her, knowing I could not, and pondering a long goodbye.
Mary has just had this news, news from angels either directly or indirectly, these glad tidings of great joy. But what is the news? What is the good news? I don't think it's not that we have armies of angels and Heavenly hosts at our beck and call, because we don't, we know we don't. If we walk out into the world and ask for armies of angels to show up the way they did that night, we'll be disappointed. But that's okay because we also know that the most transcendent and the most transformative thing that happened to Mary that night was not the angels in the sky. It was the child in her arms, which is a sentiment many of us I think can identify with.
Another way to put this is that if a heavenly host had appeared when I was holding my newborn kids, I wouldn't have paid them any attention because I was looking right at the biggest miracle in the world. Everyone in those times, long goodbyes withstanding, the good news isn't up there in the Heavens. They're shouting at us to pay attention to each other. The good news is us. It's love. It's the love that we have for each other and can have for each other and that we God has for us in Jesus Christ.
We treasure these things in our heart. I hope you will hear this story this night, even if it's so familiar you've heard it dozens, decades, so many times. We treasure these things in our heart and we ponder them, and what do we ponder? I think what we do is we consider... What we ought to do is consider what this life, what this love will cost and then we do what we must, which is bear that cost in love. Because this is what Mary does with her child, Jesus, the day of his birth and each day to follow. She loves him despite the cost. And it's what my mom did for me and my brothers and for my family. She loved us despite the cost, and it's what my family did for her too. Last month when we said goodbye, we loved her despite the cost.
And it's also what we ought to do. We who call ourselves Christians, ought to do in this world this Christmas because in this world where there are so many who are poor and weak and despised, there are no armies of angels coming to rescue them. That's on us to love them, the poor and the weak, and the despised, despite the cost. Because of course, this is also what God does to you and to me, when God meets us in this child, meets us in all our joys, in all our sadness. Meets us in our lives and in our deaths. God loves us despite the cost. Ponder these things this Christmas, then like Mary and her holy child, bear them with love.